Lister Hill Letter
Newsletter of the Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences at UAB

March/April 1999

A Medline Reminder

Ovid Web and Ovid Client search engines for the Medline Database, offered to UAB faculty, staff and students, are very good, powerful search engines for Medline, as well as for several other useful databases, such as CINAHL, HealthSTAR, CancerLit, etc.  The Ovid Web and Client have the advantage of tying our local holdings to journal sources listed in Medline. However, please be aware that although Medline indexes 3600 journals, there are possibly 20,000 health-related journals published worldwide (Lister Hill Library subscribes to about 2400).  At this time, Ovid Medline at UAB is updated monthly (we may soon be going to weekly updates).  Even so, there is prioritizing of the indexing service: some journals will get indexed much more quickly than others.  Be aware that there may be a several months' lag time before some journals are fully indexed and available.

 To keep up-to-date in your research, you should always check against several other sources.  You might begin by searching your subject or journal in the Current Contents database, which is a current awareness tool for scholarly journals.  Current Contents provides citations, with abstracts, to articles listed in the tables of contents of approximately 6900 journals in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities.  Lister Hill Library receives the full database with all 7 sections, including arts & humanities, social and behavioral sciences, and others, as well as clinical medicine and life sciences; this database is not tailored only to health sciences.  Current Contents, too, is not all-inclusive.  It may not index the journal you need.

 A further up-dating tool you will need is PubMed, another version of Medline from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), available free through the Internet by a link from the Lister Hill Library homepage or directly at  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/. The advantage to PubMed is that it is updated daily, rather than weekly or monthly.  The National Library of Medicine receives some tables of contents information directly  from the publishers.  NLM then enters this "bare bones" information into the database before the article has to go through the sometimes lengthy process of being fully indexed by a subject specialist. These very current citations, with basic citation information and some abstracts, are referred to as "PreMedline" citations. Some of the articles received electronically from publishers, however, may never be replaced by PreMedline or Medline articles if the article is out of scope for Medline.

 Another important resource is Internet Grateful Med (IGM).   IGM searches Medline using the retrieval engine of NLM's PubMed system. It shares PubMed's ability to display related articles.  Additional databases such as Toxline, Popline (POPulation information onLINE), SPACELINE (space life sciences), and BIOETHICSLINE, to name a few, are available through Internet Grateful Med.  Internet Grateful Med may be accessed through Lister Hill Library's homepage, or directly at http://igm.nlm.nih.gov/.

 It is important to realize that some highly useful journals may not even be indexed by online databases.  Some health-related journals are indexed only by Chemical Abstracts, or Biological Abstracts, which are only available at UAB at Mervyn Sterne Library in print form.  Papers presented at conferences may not be published, or may not be published for a considerable time after the conference. These proceedings may not be readily available or indexed adequately. (Medline does not index abstracts of papers presented at conferences.)

 Sterne Library has many databases you should consider, particularly PsychINFO, Pollution Abstracts, Applied Science and Technology Abstracts, Bioengineering Abstracts, and the Lexis-Nexis databases.  You can connect to Mervyn Sterne Library through the Lister Hill Library homepage or directly at  http://www.mhsl.uab.edu/.  Sterne Library has recently added several new databases, so it might be in your interest to become familiar with their offerings, particularly if  your subject is interdisciplinary.